Nuclear democracy

ISIS

Volumn 93, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 229-268

  Kaiser, David ^a  

^a MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; HISTORY;

HISTORY;

EID: 0036595870     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/344960     Document Type: Article

References (317)

1. On the German physiologists and physical scientists see Keith Anderton, "The Limits of Science: A Social, Political, and Moral Agenda for Epistemology in Nineteenth Century Germany" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard Univ., 1993), Ch. 2; cf. Timothy Lenoir, "Social Interests and the Organic Physics of 1847," in Science in Reflection, ed. Edna Ullmann-Margalit (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), pp. 169-191.
2. On Gerhardt's and Kolbe's positions see Alan Rocke, The Quiet Revolution: Hermann Kolbe and the Science of Organic Chemistry (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1993), pp. 208, 325 (my thanks to Michael Gordin for bringing this reference to my attention).
3. On the Soviet physicists' outlook see Alexei Kojevnikov, "Freedom, Collectivism, and Quasiparticles: Social Metaphors in Quantum Physics," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 1999, 29:295-331;
4. cf. Karl Hall, "Purely Practical Revolutionaries: A History of Stalinist Theoretical Physics" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard Univ., 1999).
5. On Saha see Abha Sur, "Egalitarianism in a World of Difference: Identity and Ideology in the Science of Meghnad Saha," unpublished MS. On Sakata see "Philosophical and Methodological Problems in Physics," Progress of Theoretical Physics, 1971, 50(Suppl.): 1-248;
6. Shunkichi Hirokawa and Shûzô Ogawa, "Shôichi Sakata - His Physics and Methodology," Historia Scientiarum, 1989, 36:67-81;
7. and Ziro Maki, "The Development of Elementary Particle Theory in Japan - Methodological Aspects of the Formation of the Sakata and Nagoya Models," ibid., pp. 83-95 (my thanks to Masakatsu Yamazaki for discussions of Sakata's work).
8. Cf. Loren Graham's suggestive work on the sometimes fruitful, generative appropriations of dialectical materialism by Soviet scientists: Loren Graham, Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987);
9. Graham, What Have We Learned about Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998);
10. and Graham, "Do Mathematical Equations Display Social Attributes?" Mathematical Intelligencer, 2000, 22:31-36.
11. A preprint of Chew's talk at the 1961 La Jolla conference is quoted in James Cushing, Theory Construction and Selection in Modern Physics: The S Matrix (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990) (hereafter cited as Cushing, Theory Construction), p. 143.
12. See also Murray Gell-Mann, "Particle Theory from S-Matrix to Quarks," in Symmetries in Physics (1600-1980), ed. M. G. Doncel, A. Hermann, L. Michel, and A. Pais (Barcelona: Bellaterra, 1987), pp. 479-497.
13. This portion of Chew's unpublished talk was incorporated verbatim in the introduction to his 1961 textbook, S-Matrix Theory of Strong Interactions (New York: Benjamin, 1961), pp. 1-2.
14. Several physicists cited Chew's unpublished La Jolla talk during the October 196.1 Solvay conference in Brussels, as recorded in the Solvay conference proceedings: R. Stoops, ed., The Quantum Theory of Fields (New York: Interscience, 1961), pp. 88, 132, 142, 179-180, 192-195, 214-215, 222-224.
15. In a recent interview, Chew likened his strongly worded talk at the 1961 La Jolla meeting to a "coming out of the closet" speech: Geoffrey Chew, interview with Stephen Gordon, Dec. 1997, quoted in Stephen Gordon, "Strong Interactions: Particles, Passion, and the Rise and Fall of Nuclear Democracy" (A.B. thesis, Harvard Univ., 1998) (hereafter cited as Gordon, "Strong Interactions"), p. 32.
16. Geoffrey Chew, "Nuclear Democracy and Bootstrap Dynamics," in Maurice Jacob and Chew, Strong-Interaction Physics: A. Lecture Note Volume (New York: Benjamin, 1964), pp. 103-152, on p. 105. For more on Chew's S-matrix program see esp. Cushing, Theory Construction;
17. Tian Yu Cao, "The Reggeization Program, 1962-1982: Attempts at Reconciling Quantum Field Theory with S-Matrix Theory," Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 1991, 41:239-282;
18. and David Kaiser, "Do Feynman Diagrams Endorse a Particle Ontology? The Roles of Feynman Diagrams in S-Matrix Theory," in Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Field Theory, ed. Cao (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 343-356.
19. Burt Moyer to Dean W. B. Fretter, 30 Dec. 1964, quoted in Raymond Birge, "History of the Physics Department, University of California, Berkeley," 5 vols., ca. 1966-1970 (unpublished; copies are in the Bancroft and Physics Department Libraries, Berkeley) (hereafter cited as Birge, "History"), Vol. 5, Ch. 14, p. 50.
20. On Chew's election to the NAS and his other invited lectures see ibid., pp. 49-52; "Physics Professor Wins Prize," Daily Californian [Berkeley student newspaper], 3 Jan. 1963, p. 5;
21. and Stanley Schmidt, "The 'Basic' Particle - It's Out of Date," ibid., 23 Oct. 1963, pp. 1, 12.
22. Murray Gell-Mann, "A Schematic Model of Baryons and Mesons," Physics Letters, 1964, 8:214-215;
23. and Gell-Mann, "The Symmetry Group of Vector and Axial Vector Currents," Physics, 1964, 1:63-75.
24. See also George Johnson, Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics (New York: Knopf, 1999), pp. 209-214, 225-227, 234.
25. After the tide had shifted away from the S-matrix program and back to (gauge) quantum field theories, it was Chew who suggested that quarks and the nuclear-democratic formulation could be made compatible: Geoffrey Chew, "Impasse for the Elementary-Particle Concept," in The Great Ideas Today, ed. Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1974), pp. 92-125, on pp. 124-125.
26. Chew, "Nuclear Democracy and Bootstrap Dynamics" (cit. n. 4), pp. 104-106.
27. Paul Forman's famous argument regarding the acceptance of acausal quantum mechanics in Weimar Germany may be found in Paul Forman, "Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918-1927: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment," Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1971, 3:1-115.
28. James Cushing correctly dismisses an overly simplistic reading of Chew's "nuclear democracy" vis-à-vis the Free Speech. Movement in Theory Construction, p. 217;
29. cf. Gordon, "Strong Interactions," pp. 35-37. On the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley see esp. W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), Ch. 1;
30. and Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, rev. ed. (1987; New York: Bantam, 1993), pp. 162-166.
31. On Oppenheimer see Silvan Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000).
32. On Bohm see Russell Olwell, "Physical Isolation and Marginalization in Physics: David Bohm's Cold War Exile," Isis, 1999, 90:738-756;
33. Shawn Mullet, "Political Science: The Red Scare as the Hidden Variable in the Bohmian Interpretation of Quantum Theory" (B.A. thesis, Univ. Texas, Austin, 1999);
34. and Alexei Kojevnikov, "David Bohm, and Collective Movement," unpublished MS. On Sakata's school and their dismissal by American theorists see the sources in note 1, above;
35. Robert Crease and Charles Mann, The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics (New York: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 261-262, 295-296;
36. and Johnson, Strange Beauty (cit. n. 6), pp. 202, 231-232.
37. On postwar American physicists' views of themselves see Paul Forman, "Social Niche and Self-Image of the American Physicist," in The Restructuring of Physical Sciences in Europe and the United States, 1945-1960, ed. Michelangelo de Maria et al. (Singapore: World Scientific, 1989), pp. 96-104;
38. David Kaiser, "The Postwar Suburbanization of American Physics," unpublished MS;
39. and Schweber, "The Empiricist Temper Regnant: Theoretical Physics in the United States, 1920-1950," Hist. Stud. Phys. Biol. Sci., 1986, 17:55-98. American physicists' lack of explicit political philosophizing fit within broader trends during the American 1950s.
40. See Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (New York: Free Press, 1960);
41. cf. Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998).
42. Richard Feynman, "Space-Time Approach to Quantum Electrodynamics," Physical Review, 1949, 76:769-789;
43. F. J. Dyson, "The Radiation Theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman," ibid., 1949, 75:486-502;
44. and Dyson, "The S Matrix in Quantum Electrodynamics," ibid., 1949, 75:1736-1755. "Virtual" particles, such as the photon exchanged in Figure 1, "borrow" excess energy and momentum for very short periods of time (as compared with the energy they would carry as free, noninteracting particles), as allowed by Heisenberg's uncertainty relation. According to quantum field theory, all interactions arise from the exchange of virtual particles.
45. On the introduction and use of Feynman diagrams within quantum electrodynamics see Silvan Schweber, QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994).
46. On the dispersion of Feynman diagrams during the 1950s and 1960s for new and different types of calculations see David Kaiser, "Making Theory: Producing Physics and Physicists in Postwar America" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard Univ., 2000), pp. 271-470;
47. and Kaiser, "Stick-Figure Realism: Conventions, Reification, and the Persistence of Feynman Diagrams, 1948-1964," Representations, Spring 2000, 70:49-86.
48. Chew, S-Matrix Theory of Strong Interactions (cit. n. 3), pp. 3, 5.
49. See also Chew's 1962 lectures at the Cargèse summer school: Geoffrey Chew, "Strong-Interaction S-Matrix Theory without Elementary Particles," in 1962 Cargèse Lectures in Theoretical Physics, ed. Maurice Lévy (New York: Benjamin), Lecture 11, pp. 1-37, on p. 8.
50. Chew was referring in particular to Lev Landau's 1959 modified rules for using the diagrams, which in turn had been based on Chew's 1958 work on the so-called particle-pole conjecture. The particle-pole conjecture stipulated that the only pole-like singularities within the scattering amplitude for a given process would occur uniquely at the values of mass and momentum, corresponding to an exchanged particle. Landau used this speculation to derive general rules for isolating the singularities within generic scattering amplitudes. See Chew, "Proposal for Determining the Pion-Nucleon Coupling Constant from the Angular Distribution for NucleonNucleon Scattering," Phys. Rev., 1958, 112:1380-1383;
51. Lev Landau, "On Analytic Properties of Vertex Parts in Quantum. Field Theory," Nuclear Physics, 1959, 13:181-192;
52. Cushing, Theory Construction, pp. 109-113, 129-131;
53. and Kaiser, "Do Feynman Diagrams Endorse a Particle Ontology?" (cit. n. 4), pp. 345-349.
54. Chew, "Strong-Interaction S-Matrix Theory without Elementary Particles," pp. 6-7. Here Chew was again referring to his own 1958 particle-pole conjecture. He later emphasized the "decisive" role played by his new interpretation of Feynman diagrams, writing that by the end of the 1950s it had become clear to him "that graphs of the type invented by Richard Feynman for perturbative evaluation of a Lagrangian field theory are relevant to the analytic S matrix, independent of any approximation based on a small coupling constant." Geoffrey Chew, "Particles as S-Matrix Poles: Hadron Democracy," in Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s, ed. Laurie Brown, Max Dresden, and Lillian Hoddeson (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 600-607, on p. 601.
55. In addition to his particle-pole conjecture and Landau's rules for Feynman diagrams, Chew drew especially on Feynman diagrams' crossing symmetry (as established in 1954), single- and double-variable dispersion relations (which had been formulated during 1954-1958), and Tullio Regge's analysis of complex angular momenta in potential scattering (from 1959). On the dispersion relations work see Marvin Goldberger, "Introduction to the Theory and Application of Dispersion Relations," in Relations de dispersion et particules élémentaires [Proceedings of the 1960 Les Houches Summer School], ed. C. de Witt and R. Omnès (Paris: Hermann, 1960), pp. 15-157;
56. and J. D. Jackson, "Introduction to Dispersion Relation Techniques," in Dispersion Relations: Scottish Universities' Summer School, 1960, ed. G. R. Screaton (New York: Interscience, 1961), pp. 1-63. Cushing treats the relation of these various ideas and approaches to Chew's S-matrix program in Theory Construction, Chs. 3-5.
57. The experimental discovery of the p meson as a resonance in pion scattering was announced in A. R. Erwin, R. March, W. D. Walker, and E. West, "Evidence for a π-π Resonance in the I = 1, J= 1 State," Physical Review Letters, 1961, 6:628-630.
58. It had been predicted earlier in William Frazer and José Fulco, "Effect of a Pion-Pion Scattering Resonance on Nucleon Structure," ibid., 1959, 2:365-368;
59. and Frazer and Fulco, "Partial-Wave Dispersion Relations for the Process π + π → N + N," Phys. Rev., 1960, 117:1603-1608. Frazer completed his dissertation under Chew's direction in 1959, and Chew helped to advise Fulco's dissertation, completed in 1962 in Buenos Aires. Years later, Frazer recalled that "Geoff advised us every step of the way" with, this work "but generously decided not to put his name on the paper":
60. Frazer, "The Analytic and Unitary S-Matrix," in A Passion for Physics: Essays in Honor of Geoffrey Chew, ed. Carleton DeTar, J. Finklestein, and Chung-I Tan (Singapore: World Scientific, 1985) (hereafter cited as DeTar et al., eds., Passion for Physics), pp. 1-8, on p. 4.
61. Frederik Zachariasen, "Self-Consistent Calculation of the Mass and Width, of the J = 1, T = 1 ππ Resonance," Phys. Rev. Lett., 1961, 7:112-113;
62. erratum, ibid., p. 268;
63. and Zachariasen and Charles Zemach, "Pion Resonances," Phys. Rev., 1962, /28:849-858.
64. Chew, S-Matrix Theory of Strong Interactions (cit. n. 3), p. 32 (emphasis added). The same paragraph appears in his summer-school lectures from 1960 - Geoffrey Chew, "Double Dispersion Relations and Unitarity as the Basis of a Dynamical Theory of Strong Interactions," in Dispersion Relations, ed. Screaton (cit. n. 14), pp. 167- 226, on p. 185 -
65. and in the proceedings of the 1960 Les Houches summer school - Relations de dispersion et particules élémentaires, ed. de Witt and Omnès (cit. n. 14), pp. 455-514.
66. The duplication is not surprising since, as Chew explained, the 1961 lecture note volume "originated in lectures given at summer schools at Les Houches and Edinburgh in 1960": Chew, S-Matrix Theory of Strong Interactions, p. vi.
67. Chew, "Nuclear Democracy and Bootstrap Dynamics" (cit. n. 4), p. 106. Chew's former postdoc and partner in the early bootstrap work, Steven Frautschi, explained simply in lectures from the 1961/1962 academic year that "bootstrap calculations lean heavily on 'crossing,'" that is, on the symmetries obeyed by scattering amplitudes as the associated Feynman diagrams underwent various rotations: Steven Frautschi, Regge Poles and S-Matrix Theory (New York: Benjamin, 1963), p. 176.
68. The bootstrap notion was illustrated with the aid of crossed Feynman diagrams in Chew, "Nuclear Democracy and Bootstrap Dynamics," pp. 134, 136,
69. and also in a text by one of Chew's former students: William Frazer, Elementary Particles (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966), p. 134.
70. For more on Chew's bootstrap see James Cushing, "Is There Just One Possible World? Contingency vs. the Bootstrap," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 1985, /6:31-48;
71. Cushing, Theory Construction, Ch. 6;
72. Cao, "Reggeization Program" (cit. n. 4);
73. Kaiser, "Do Feynman Diagrams Endorse a Particle Ontology?" (cit. n. 4);
74. and Yehudah Freundlich, "Theory Evaluation and the Bootstrap Hypothesis," Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci., 1980, 11:267-277.
75. Chew expanded on his bootstrap idea in several popular pieces written after the idea had fallen from favor for most particle theorists. See Geoffrey Chew, "'Bootstrap': A Scientific Idea?" Science, 23 Aug. 1968, 161:762-765;
76. Chew, "Hadron Bootstrap: Triumph or Frustration?" Physics Today, Oct. 1970, 23:23-28;
77. and Chew, "Impasse for the Elementary-Particle Concept" (cit. n. 6). See also the interview of Chew by Fritjof Capra: "Bootstrap Physics: A Conversation with Geoffrey Chew," in Passion for Physics, ed. DeTar et al., pp. 247-286.
78. See G. F. Chew and S. C. Frautschi, "Unified Approach to High- and Low-Energy Strong Interactions on the Basis of the Mandelstam Representation," Phys. Rev. Lett., 1960, 5:580-583;
79. Chew and Frautschi, "Principle of Equivalence for All Strongly-Interacting Particles within the S-Matrix Framework," ibid., 1961, 7:394-397;
80. Chew and S. Mandelstam, "Theory of Low-Energy Pion-Pion Interaction," Phys. Rev., 1960, 119:467-477;
81. Chew and Mandelstam, "Theory of Low-Energy Pion-Pion Interaction, II," Nuovo Cimenta, 1961, 19:752-776;
82. and Chew, Frautschi, and Mandelstam, "Regge Poles in ππ Scattering," Phys. Rev., 1962, 126:1202-1208.
83. See also the references cited in note 18, above, as well as Frederik Zachariasen, "Lectures on Bootstraps," in Recent Developments in Particle Physics, ed. Michael Moravcsik (New York: Gordon & Breach, 1966), pp. 86-151, and references therein.
84. Zachariasen, "Self-Consistent Calculation" (cit. n. 16);
85. and Zachariasen and Zemach, "Pion Resonances" (cit. n. 16).
86. For further details on the steps within Zachariasen and Zemach's calculation see Kaiser, "Making Theory" (cit. n. 11), pp. 442-444.
87. Zachariasen and Zemach improved on the closeness between their result and experimental data by including the exchange of three other particles in addition to the p in their calculation; Zachariasen's original calculation included only the pion-p interaction. Cushing treats some of the other early successes of Chew's S-matrix program in Theory Construction, pp. 145-151.
88. Chew, "Nuclear Democracy and Bootstrap Dynamics" (cit. n. 4), p. 106.
89. Chew, S-Matrix Theory of Strong Interactions (cit. n. 3), p. 4 ("general philosophical convictions");
90. and Chew, interview with Gordon, Dec. 1997, quoted in Gordon, "Strong Interactions," pp. 31-32.
91. These biographical details are taken from Raymond Birge to Dean A. R. Davis, 27 Feb. 1949, in Raymond Thayer Birge Correspondence and Papers, call number 73/79c, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter cited as Birge Papers);
92. and A. C. Helmholz to Dean Lincoln Constance, 25 Mar. 1957, Birge Papers, Box 40, Folder "Letters written by Birge, January-May 1957." Some clarification may be helpful here. Letters written by Birge are filed chronologically. The items cited in this essay are from Boxes 39 and 40; explicit folder titles will not be cited. Letters written to Birge (and other pertinent materials in this collection) will be cited with box number and folder titles.
93. For further biographical information see also Birge, "History," Vol. 5, Ch. 19, pp. 43-51; and DeTar et al., eds., Passion for Physics.
94. The literature on HUAC and McCarthyism is, of course, vast. On McCarthyism and American higher education in particular see esp. Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986);
95. Sigmund Diamond, Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992);
96. James Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1993), Chs. 19, 21-23, 31;
97. Noam Chomsky et al, eds., The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New York: New Press, 1997);
98. Catharine M. Hornby, "Harvard Astronomy in the Age of McCarthyism" (A.B. thesis, Harvard Univ., 1997), esp. Ch. 2;
99. Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: Univ. North Carolina Press, 1999);
100. Lawrence Badash, "Science and McCarthyism," Minerva, 2000, 38:53-80;
101. Naomi Oreskes and Ronald Rainger, "Science and Security before the Atomic Bomb: The Loyalty Case of Harald U. Sverdrup," Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 2000, 31:309-369;
102. and Schweber, Shadow of the Bomb (cit. n. 9). On the politicization of American scientists before World War II
103. see Peter J. Kuznick, Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists as Political Activists in 1930s America (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1987).
104. On the establishment of the Radiation Laboratory see John Heilbron and Robert Seidel, Lawrence and His Laboratory: A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Vol. 1 (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1990). On the HUAC investigation of the Rad Lab physicists see the San Francisco-area newspaper clippings in Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, Records, ca. 1920-1962, call number CU-68, Bancroft Library (hereafter cited as Dept. Physics, Berkeley, Records, ca. 1920-1962), Folder 4:12;
105. "Thomas Committee Calls Ex-Instructor," Daily Californian, 22 Sept. 1948, p. 5;
106. Louis Bell, '"No Great Surprise' ; Identity of Scientist X Suspected Here," ibid., 3 Oct. 1949, p. 1;
107. "Ex-Physicist at U.C. Held for Perjury," ibid., 26 May 1952, p. 1;
108. and Schrecker, No Ivory Tower, pp. 126-148. The specifics of the legal case against the Rad Lab physicists are outlined in Carl Beck, Contempt of Congress (New Orleans, La.: Hauser, 1959), pp. 65-70.
109. Two other cases involving Berkeley scientists also caught the attention of HUAC and the national media in 1948: those of Martin Kamen and E. U. Condon. See Martin Kamen, Radiant Science, Dark Politics: A Memoir of the Nuclear Age (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1985), Chs. 11, 12;
110. and Jessica Wang, "Science, Security, and the Cold War: The Case of E. U. Condon," Isis, 1992, 83:238-269. Condon was at the time the head of the National Bureau of Standards, having formerly been an undergraduate and graduate student at Berkeley and a consultant at the Berkeley Rad Lab during World War II. See also Schweber, Shadow of the Bomb.
111. "T.A. Queried on Communist Ties," Daily Californian, 28 Sept. 1949 [misprinted as 1948], p. 1
112. (see also the Daily Californian stories on 4 Jan. 1950, p. 1; 27 Mar. 1950, p. 7; and 31 Mar. 1950, pp. I1 4);
113. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower, pp. 126-127;
114. and David Gardner, The California Oath Controversy (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1967), pp. 91-94.
115. For the graduate students' protest see Letter to the Editor, San Francisco Chronicle, 27 May 1949;
116. I. David Fox was among the signers. See also Birge to Lyman Spitzer, Jr., 26 May 1949, Birge Papers;
117. E.R. [Eugene Rabinowitch], "The 'Cleansing' of AEC Fellowships," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June-July 1949, 5:161-162;
118. "The Fellowship Program: Testimony before the Joint Committee," ibid., pp. 166-178;
119. "Loyalty Tests Cause Cut in AEC Fellowship Program," ibid., Jan. 1950, 6:32;
120. "The Curtailment of the AEC Fellowship Program," ibid., pp. 34,62-63;
121. "Loyalty Tests for Science Students?" ibid., Apr. 1950, 6:98;
122. and Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety (cit. n. 24), Ch. 7. On the debates over the founding of the NSF
123. see Daniel Kevles, "The National Science Foundation and the Debate over Postwar Research Policy, 1942-1945," Isis, 1977, 68:5-26;
124. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America, 2nd ed. (1978; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), Chs. 11-12;
125. Nathan Reingold, "Vannevar Bush's New Deal for Research; or, The Triumph of the Old Order," Hist. Stud Phys. Biol. Sci., 1987, 17:299-344;
126. and Jessica Wang, "Liberals, the Progressive Left, and the Political Economy of Postwar American Science: The National Science Foundation Debate Revisited," Hist. Stud. Phys. Sci., 1995, 26:139-166. On the issue of the attorney general's list of "subversive" organizations and NSF grants see Birge to Robert G. Sproul, 14 Mar. 1950, Birge Papers.
127. On draft deferments see Birge to R. C. Gibbs, 10 Aug. 1950, and Birge to Local Board No. 62, Santa Clara County, 8 June 1953, Birge Papers; and David Kaiser, "Putting the 'Big' in 'Big Science' : Cold War Requisitions, Scientific Manpower, and the Production of American Physicists after World War II," unpublished MS. The concerns with draft deferments for physics students persisted well after fighting had ceased in Korea; see the correspondence from 1958 in the American Institute of Physics, Education and Manpower Division, Records, 1951-1973, Box 4, Folder "Scientific Manpower Commission, Washington, D.C." These records are held in the American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library, College Park, Maryland, call number AR15. On security clearance troubles see Birge to K. K. Darrow, 11 Jan. 1955, Birge Papers;
128. Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety;
129. Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford, 1994), pp. 37-40, 150-164;
130. and Adam Yarmolinsky, ed., Case Studies in Personnel Security (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Affairs, 1955).
131. Regarding passport and visa problems see Birge to Darrow, 26 May 1955;
132. Birge to Congressman Francis Walter, 15 July 1955;
133. and Birge to Senator Harley Kilgore, 17 Nov. 1955: Birge Papers. The Federation of American Scientists focused on passport and visa problems; many of their efforts were reported in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a special issue of which (Oct. 1952, 8) was dedicated especially to these problems.
134. On the exclusion of foreign scientists from the Rad Lab see Birge to Walter Thirring, 8 Jan. 1952, Dept. Physics, Berkeley, Records, ca. 1920-1962, Folder 5:117.
135. On the establishment of the AEC national laboratory system see Richard Hewlett and Francis Duncan, A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Vol. 2: Atomic Shield, 1947-1952 (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1969), Ch. 8;
136. Robert Seidel, "A Home for Big Science: The Atomic Energy Commission's Laboratory System," Hist. Stud. Phys. Sci., 1986, 16:135-175;
137. and Peter Westwick, "The National Laboratory System in the U.S., 1947-1962" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. California, Berkeley, 1999).
138. Sandra Littlewood and Skip Garretson, "Espionage at the Rad Lab - Naw!" Daily Californian, 11 Dec. 1953, p. 8. It is interesting to note that this was the only segment of the five-part series that Birge clipped and saved with his other newspaper clippings, which may be found in Dept. Physics, Berkeley, Records, ca. 1920-1962, Folder 4:12.
139. Birge to Darrow, 22 May 1953, Birge Papers; Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Transcript of Hearing before Personnel Security Board (Washington, D.C.: Atomic Energy Commission, 1954);
140. Philip Stern, The Oppenheimer Case: Security on Trial (New York: Harper & Row, 1969);
141. John Major, The Oppenheimer Hearing (New York: Stein & Day, 1971);
142. and Barton J. Bernstein, '"In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer,'" Hist. Stud. Phys. Sci., 1982, 12:195-252.
143. Of course, not all members of the Berkeley department were shocked by the news; some had even lobbied behind the scenes to ensure the outcome. On Berkeley involvement in and reactions to the hearing see "Oppenheimer Conflict: Former Professor Center of Dispute," Daily Californian, 15 Apr. 1954, p. 1;
144. Birge to Edwin A. Uehling, 28 Mar. 1955, Birge Papers;
145. Birge, "History," Vol. 5, Ch. 17;
146. Nuel Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), Chs. 8-10;
147. Luis W. Alvarez, Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist (New York: Basic, 1987), pp. 179-181;
148. and A. Carl Helmholz with Graham Hale and Ann Lage, Faculty Governance and Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, 1937-1990 (Berkeley: Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, 1993), pp. 152-157, 276-279.
149. Gardner, California Oath Controversy (cit. n. 26); and Schrecker, No Ivory Tower (cit. n. 24), pp. 116-125.
150. See also George Stewart, The Year of the Oath (New York: Doubleday, 1950);
151. Birge, "History," Vol. 5, Ch. 19;
152. and Helmholz with Hale and Lage, Faculty Governance, pp. 96-97, 152-157.
153. Gardner cautions against reading the regents' enactment of the oath too narrowly as a direct reaction to the state legislature's proposals, which, he concludes, provided only a clearly articulated measure of the "mood" of the times: Gardner, California Oath Controversy, p. 10.
154. See the forms and notices in Dept. Physics, Berkeley, Records, ca. 1920-1962, Folder 3:41; and Gardner, California Oath Controversy, pp. 52-54.
155. One of the early faculty leaders who spoke out against the oath because of what he perceived to be ties to fascist practices was Ernst Kantorowicz, a German-born medieval historian. See Grover Sales, Jr., "The Scholar and the Loyalty Oath," San Francisco Chronicle, 8 Dec. 1963, pp. 27-30, written soon after Kantorowicz's death. Robert Serber recalled that Gian Carlo Wick, a physicist at Berkeley who refused to sign the oath, said at the time that "he had been coerced into taking an oath once before in Italy, where he had to swear loyalty to Mussolini; he said he'd regretted it ever since and wasn't going to make the same mistake twice."
156. Robert Serber with Robert Crease, Peace and War: Reminiscences of a Life on the Frontiers of Science (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998), p. 171.
157. Another Berkeley physicist, Emilio Segrè, on the other hand, later wrote that he had signed at least fifteen loyalty oaths while in Mussolini's Italy; thus he found them all meaningless, and therefore, as a practical matter, he saw little reason not to sign the California oath as well. In fact, as he put it, "I even remembered a pronouncement by Pope Pius XI, elicited by a Fascist oath, explicitly stating that under certain circumstances one could take such oaths with mental reservations that made them void. I dug the papal document out in the library and translated it, and some colleagues to whom I had sent it posted it in Los Alamos, which administratively depended on the Regents of the University of California. At Berkeley it circulated less openly." Emilio Segrè, A Mind Always in Motion: The Autobiography of Emilio Segrè (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1993), pp. 235-236.
158. On the weekly meetings in the faculty club see Gardner, California Oath Controversy, p. 87.
159. Gardner, California Oath Controversy, Chs. 5-6;
160. and Schrecker, No Ivory Tower (cit. n. 24), pp. 120-122.
161. O. Lundberg, University Controller, memo to "chairmen of departments, administrative officers, and others concerned," 27 Nov. 1950;
162. RLY [Rebekah Young], Physics Department Secretary, to Lundberg, 30 Nov. 1950;
163. M. A. Stewart, Associate Dean of the Graduate Division, memo to Physics Department Graduate Advisers, 14 Dec. 1950: Dept. Physics, Berkeley, Records, ca. 1920-1962, Folder 3:41. Rebekah Young to Robert Serber, 18 July 1951; and Serber to Young, 25 July, 1951: Dept. Physics, Berkeley, Records, ca. 1920-1962, Folder 3:4. Birge, "Memorandum to Members of the Physics Department Staff," 6 Apr. 1950; and Birge to Sproul, 14 Mar. 1950: Birge Papers.
164. Birge, "History," Vol. 5, Ch. 19, pp. 1-15; and Gardner, California Oath Controversy (cit. n. 26), pp. 123-124, 171-172. Some of Birge's speeches at Academic Senate and physics department faculty meetings are reprinted in Birge, "History," Vol. 5, Ch. 19, pp. 8-12.
165. Gardner, California Oath Controversy, p. 248;
166. reference to the "atmosphere" at the Rad Lab comes from Geoffrey Chew's letter of resignation, quoted below. See also Helmholz with Hale and Lage, Faculty Governance (cit. n. 31), pp. 96-97, 153;
167. Serber with Crease, Peace and War (cit. n. 34), pp. 171-172;
168. and Segrè, Mind Always in Motion (cit. n. 34), pp. 234-237. Jack Steinberger was one of the postdocs dismissed on 30 June 1950 for not signing the oath.
169. See Jack Steinberger, "A Particular View of Particle Physics in the Fifties," in Pions to Quarks, ed. Brown et al (cit. n. 13), pp. 307-330, esp. p. 311;
170. and Steinberger, "Early Particles," Annual Review of Nuclear
171. Birge suggests that Chew was "apparently" the first professor to resign from all of the University of California over the oath controversy in Birge, "History," Vol. 5, Ch. 19, p. 45. Robert Serber recounts his own decision to leave in Serber with Crease, Peace and War, pp. 171-172.
172. Serber had endured an extended, and at times hostile, personal security review in 1948, though perhaps because of his close affiliation with Ernest Lawrence his case did not stir the same media attention as the HUAC Rad Lab investigation did (ibid., pp. 162-165).
173. For more on Serber's continuing security woes see Barton Bernstein, "Interpreting the Elusive Robert Serber: What Serber Says and What Serber Does Not Explicitly Say," Stud. Hist. Phil. Mod. Phys., 2001, 32:443-486. Wolfgang Pauli kept abreast of the developments in Berkeley's physics department via his friend Erwin Panofsky, a senior art historian at the Institute for Advanced Study, whose son Wolfgang was one of the experimentalists to leave Berkeley's department because of the loyalty oath. In October 1950 Pauli forwarded to the elder Panofsky news that he had heard from the young theorist J. M. Luttinger. Pauli quoted from Luttinger in his letter to Panofsky: "Apart from Physics, the atmosphere is very unpleasant in Berkeley. Both [Gian Carlo] Wick and [Harold] Lewis have been fired for refusing to sign a Loyalty Oath, and both (so far as I know) are fighting the case in court. They have only a very slim chance of winning - on the whole it is a degrading business.
174. In addition to that the lab is full of secret work, and is overrun by petty officials and bureaucracts of all kinds." Wolfgang Pauli to Erwin Panofsky, 23 Oct. 1950
175. in Wolfgang Pauli, Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, ed. Karl von Meyenn (New York: Springer, 1996), Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 179.
176. Birge notes that Dean A. R. Davis sent the official letter of appointment to Chew on 1 Apr. 1949 (Birge, "History," Vol. 5, Ch. 19, p. 45); the regents enacted the new loyalty oath in their meeting on 25 Mar. 1949. While still a postdoc at the Rad Lab, Chew had delivered several talks on his research to the physics department, both formal and informal, so that Birge could introduce Chew as already "well known" at the Sept. 1949 departmental meeting. See Birge's handwritten notes, "First Dept. meeting, Wed., Sept. 28, 1949," Dept. Physics, Berkeley, Records, ca. 1920-1962, Folder 2:4.
177. Geoffrey Chew to J. Robert Oppenheimer, 11 May 1950, quoted in Birge, "History," Vol. 5, Ch. 19, p. 45 (Birge also notes discussions with Chew over his frustration with Academic Senate resolutions regarding the oath); and Chew to Birge, 24 July 1950, Birge Papers, Box 5, Folder "Chew, Geoffrey Foucar, 1924-."
178. Chew to Birge, 24 July 1950;
179. and Birge, "History," Vol. 5, Ch. 19, p. 47. Chew's emphasis on the importance of the Korean war is echoed in several historians' recent studies of postwar American science policy.
180. See Daniel Kevles, "Cold War and Hot Physics: Science, Security, and the American State, 1945-56," His. Stud. Phys. Biol. Sci., 1990, 20:239-264;
181. Hershberg, James B. Conant (cit. n. 24), Chs. 27-28;
182. Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety (cit. n. 24), Ch. 8; and Kaiser, "Putting the 'Big' in 'Big Science'" (cit. n. 28). The University of Illinois also had a standing loyalty oath requirement at the time Chew accepted his job there, but one that did not mention the Communist Party or any other group by name. Birge and University of California president Sproul found it ironic that Chew would agree to go to Illinois, but Chew explained that in Illinois this was "the same oath required of all state employees . . . [and] no one feels it to be a restriction on his political activity. . . . The intent of the trustees, therefore, does not seem, inimicable [sic] to academic freedom." In other words, as far as Chew was concerned, the Illinois oath did not single out faculty for special treatment or unfair scrutiny. Chew to Birge, 24 July 1950.
183. Geoffrey Chew, "Academic Freedom on Trial at the University of California," Bull Atom. Sci., Nov. 1950, 6:333-336, on p. 336. The objection that faculty were singled out for closer scrutiny than other people was a common one among Berkeley faculty. Chew noted this in passing on p. 334 of his article; he gave it a more extended discussion in his letter to Birge of 24 July 1950. See also Birge, "History," Vol. 5, Ch. 19;
184. Gardner, California Oath Controversy (cit. n. 26), Ch. 3;
185. and Schrecker, No Ivory Tower (cit. n. 24), pp. 122-123.
186. See esp. Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety (cit. n. 24). On the founding and early years of the FAS
187. see also Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists' Movement in America, 1945-7 (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1965).
188. Francis Low, interview with the author, MIT, 11 Apr. 2001; David Kaiser, "Francis E. Low: Coming of Age as a Physicist in Postwar America," Physics @ MIT, 2001, 14:24-31, 70-77, on pp. 71-72;
189. and "Summary of Testimony of Linus Pauling," Bull. Atom. Sci., Jan. 1956, 12:28.
190. Geoffrey Chew, "Passport Problems," Bull Atom. Sci., Jan. 1956, 12:26-28, on p. 28. This article includes Chew's testimony from 15 Nov. 1955.
191. See also "FAS Congressional Activity in 1955," ibid., p. 45. The specific items Chew lobbied for were conspicuously absent in all kinds of hearings from this period, having been denied to witnesses in HUAC hearings, local security-clearance boards, and often even university committees.
192. See Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety (cit. n. 24);
193. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower (cit. n. 24);
194. and Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (New York: Little, Brown, 1998). The FAS was quite active during the mid 1950s on the issue of passports and visas for scientists.
195. The entire issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for Oct. 1952 was dedicated to the topic.
196. See also E.R. [Eugene Rabinowitch], "How to Lose Friends," Bull Atom. Sci., Jan. 1952, 8:2-5;
197. Victor Weisskopf, "Visas for Foreign Scientists," ibid., Mar. 1954, 10:68-69, 112;
198. "American Visa Policy: A Report," ibid., Dec. 1955, 11:367-373;
199. and John Toll, "Scientists Urge Lifting Travel Restrictions," ibid., Oct. 1958, 14:326-328.
200. With regard to Chew's return to Berkeley see the handwritten notes between Francis Jenkins, Robert Brode, and Raymond Birge, undated, ca. Apr. 1951, Dept. Physics, Berkeley, Records, ca. 1920-1962, Folder 5:25; on Chew's 1953 offer to return to Berkeley see Chew to Birge, 21 Apr. 1953, Birge Papers, Box 5, Folder "Chew, Geoffrey Foucar, 1924-"; and on his 1957/1958 appointment see Helmholz to Constance, 25 Mar. 1957, Birge Papers, Box 40, Folder "Letters written by Birge, January-May 1957." Helmholz's financial jockeying becomes clear in both ibid. and Helmholz to Chancellor Clark Kerr, 5 Mar. 1957, Dept. Physics, Berkeley, Records, ca. 1920-1962, Folder 1:26. The reappointment of the nonsigners was conditional on their signing a new statewide loyalty oath, the so-called Levering oath, which was even more explicitly anti-Communist than the original university oath had been. The key difference was that the Levering oath was imposed on all state employees, so that university faculty were no longer singled out for special treatment. See Gardner, California Oath Controversy (cit. n. 26), pp. 250, 253-254;
201. and Schrecker, No Ivory Tower, pp. 123-125.
202. Many of Chew's former colleagues and students recalled that his group was unusually large and that he still made time to work carefully with each of them. See Birge, "History," Vol. 5, Ch. 19, p. 51; Frazer, "Analytic and Unitary S Matrix" (cit. n. 15), p. 7;
203. Georgella Perry, "My Years with Professor Chew," in Passion for Physics, ed. DeTar et al., pp. 14-16, on p. 15;
204. Steven Frautschi, "My Experiences with the S-Matrix Program," ibid., pp. 44-48, on p. 44;
205. Carleton DeTar, "What Are the Quark and Gluon Poles?" ibid., pp. 71-78, on p. 77;
206. David Gross, "On the Uniqueness of Physical Theories," ibid., pp. 128-136, on p. 128;
207. C Edward Jones, "Deducing T, C, and P Invariance for Strong Interactions in Topological Particle Theory," ibid., pp. 189-194, on p. 189;
208. William Frazer, interview with, the author, 7 July 1998;
209. Jerome Finkelstein, interview with the author, 24 July 1998;
210. Eyvind Wichmann, interview with, the author, 13 Aug. 1998;
211. and Henry Stapp, interview with the author, 21 Aug. 1998 (all interviews were conducted in Berkeley).
212. A list of Chew's former graduate students, together with their years of graduation, appears in Frazer, "Analytic and Unitary S Matrix," pp. 7-8.
213. On Oppenheimer's pedagogical approach see Robert Serber, "The Early Years," Phys. Today, Oct. 1967, 20:35-39;
214. Serber with Crease, Peace and War (cit. n. 34), Ch. 2;
215. Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Werner, eds., Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), Ch. 3;
216. and Kevles, Physicists (cit. n. 27), pp. 216-219. In 1958 Schwinger was technically advising sixteen Harvard graduate students;
217. see "1958-59 Department Lists," in Department of Physics, Harvard University, Correspondence, 1958-60, Box A-P, Folder "1958-59 Department Lists," call number UAV 691.10, Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bryce DeWitt, who completed his dissertation under Schwinger in 1949, talked about Schwinger's style with me during several discussions; William Frazer raised the contrast between Chew and Schwinger during our interview.
218. Gross, "Uniqueness of Physical Theories" (cit. n. 48), p. 128 ("full partners"). Both Carleton DeTar and Steven Frautschi recalled the lunches during their interviews with Stephen Gordon; see Gordon, "Strong Interactions," pp. 27-28.
219. Details on Chew's "secret seminars" come from Frautschi, "My Experiences with the S-Matrix Program" (cit. n. 48), p. 44;
220. A. Capella et al., "The Pomeron Story," in Passion for Physics, ed. DeTar et al, pp. 79-87, on pp. 86-87; and my interviews with Frazer, Finkelstein, Wichmann, and Mandelstam. The term "little red schoolhouse" comes from an interview between Carleton DeTar and Stephen Gordon, conducted May 1997, and quoted in Gordon, "Strong Interactions," p. 29. Several more of Chew's former students with whom Gordon spoke also recalled Chew's "secret seminar." In the 1930s Berkeley's physics department held informal weekly seminars, attended by faculty and graduate students alike, though this single department-wide meeting disappeared after World War II. Carl Helmholz and Howard Shugart discussed these older seminars during my interviews with them in Berkeley on 14 July 1998 and 29 July 1998, respectively.
221. See the handwritten notes, dated Mar. 1960, on "Special Meeting APS," in Dept. Physics, Berkeley, Records, ca. 1920-1962, Folder 1:39, and the typed minutes from a planning meeting held on 4 Mar. 1960, in the same folder. The handwritten notes are probably by either Carl Helmholz, chair of the department at this time and head of the conference-planning committee, or Howard Shugart, who was a secretary to the conference-planning committee; the notes appear to match Helmholz's handwriting.
222. Victor Weisskopf to J. Howard McMillen, 14 Mar. 1960, Birge Papers, Box 29, Folder "Weisskopf, Victor Frederick, 1908-." As it turned out, the NSF refused any financial aid because the Berkeley meeting was under the auspices of the APS; additional funding for the meeting was provided by the AEC and United States Air Force. See the typed report "Conference on Strong Interactions," undated, Dept. Physics, Berkeley, Records, ca. 1920-1962, Folder 1:39; an unsigned, undated postconference report in this folder gives the attendance figure. The Rochester conferences on nuclear and particle physics began in 1950 at the University of Rochester; when they began to move to different venues during the mid 1950s, they still retained the name "Rochester conference." See, e.g., John Polkinghorne, Rochester Roundabout: The Story of High-Energy Physics (New York: Freeman, 1989).
223. Like Chew, Weisskopf became quite active with the FAS during the 1950s; while Chew chaired the Passport Committee, Weisskopf headed the Visa Committee. See Victor Weisskopf, "Report on the Visa Situation," Bull. Atom. Sci., Oct. 1952, 8:221-222;
224. and Weisskopf, "Visas for Foreign Scientists," ibid., Mar. 1954, 10:68-69, 112.
225. Schedules and reports on the presentations at the 1960 Berkeley meeting may be found in Dept. Physics, Berkeley, Records, ca. 1920-1962, Folder 1:39. The general principles on which Chew and his collaborators hoped to build their non-field-theoretic S-matrix theory included analyticity, unitarity, Lorentz invariance, and crossing symmetry, not all of which are independent from each other. See esp. Chew, S-Matrix Theory of Strong Interactions (cit. n. 3);
226. and Cushing, Theory Construction, Chs. 5-7.
227. Geoffrey Chew, "S-Matrix Theory of Strong Interactions without Elementary Particles," Reviews of Modern Physics, 1962, 34:394-401, on p. 400 ("merrymaking");
228. Chew, "The Dubious Role of the Space-Time Continuum in Microscopic Physics," Science Progress, 1963, 57:529-539, on p. 538 (nonexperts' advantage) (this article contains the text of Chew's 1963 Rouse Ball Lecture at Cambridge);
229. and Roland Omnès and Marcel Froissart, Mandelstam Theory and Regge Poles: An Introduction for Experimentalists (New York: Benjamin, 1963) (Froissart spent time working with Chew's group in Berkeley during the early 1960s). Owen Chamberlain in particular recalled Chew's special lectures for experimentalists;
230. see Owen Chamberlain, "Interactions with Geoff Chew," in Passion for Physics, ed. DeTar et al, pp. 11-13, on p. 13. Chew's unusual ability and interest in instructing experimentalists was by this time long standing. As a visiting professor at Berkeley in 1957, Chew gave a seminar on the pion-nucleon interaction, which drew an unusual number of experimentalists from the Radiation Laboratory and from Livermore, in addition to the graduate students enrolled in the course. Carl Helmholz reported that the experimentalists "are getting considerable benefit from it even though the subject is quite abstract and mathematical": Helmholz to Constance, 25 Mar. 1957 (cit. n. 47). William Frazer also discussed Chew's informal seminar for experimentalists during our interview.
231. John Polkinghorne, "Salesman of Ideas," in Passion for Physics, ed. DeTar et al, pp. 23-25, on p. 23.
232. Polkinghorne worked on S-matrix theory while based in Cambridge, England. For a similar analysis of the role of charisma in modern physics see Charles Thorpe and Steven Shapin, "Who Was J. Robert Oppenheimer? Charisma and Complex Organization," Social Studies of Science, 2000, 30:545-590.
233. Owen Chamberlain and Georgella Perry (Chew's former secretary) both mentioned Chew's baseball pretensions: Chamberlain, "Interactions with Geoff Chew," pp. 12-13; and Perry, "My Years with Professor Chew" (cit. n. 48), pp. 14-16. Several other physicists recalled these same rumors during interviews with Stephen Gordon: Gordon, "Strong Interactions," p. 15.
234. Louis Balázs to David Kaiser, 6 Aug. 1998; and Frazer interview. See also Perry, "My Years with Professor Chew," pp. 15-16.
235. Chew, S-Matrix Theory of Strong Interactions (cit. n. 3), pp. vii-viii;
236. and Geoffrey Chew, The Analytic S Matrix: A Basis for Nuclear Democracy (New York: Benjamin, 1966), p. v.
237. Frazer interview; Finkelstein interview; Ramamurti Shankar, "Effective Field Theory in Condensed Matter Physics," in Conceptual Foundations of Quantum Field Theory, ed. Cao (cit. n. 4), pp. 47-55, on p. 47;
238. and Gross, "Uniqueness of Physical Theories" (cit. n. 48), p. 128. Dissertations by Chew's students from 1959 to 1983 may be found in the Berkeley Physics Department Library.
239. Chew's "Double Dispersion Relations and Unitarity as the Basis of a Dynamical Theory of Strong Interactions" (cit. n. 17) appeared in both Relations de dispersion et particules élémentaires, ed. de Witt and Omnès (cit. n. 14), pp. 455-514, and in Dispersion Relations, ed. Screaton (cit. n. 14), pp. 167-258.
240. See also the "Editor's Note" ibid., p. viii. One might compare Chew and his "missionaries" with Niels Bohr and the spread of the "Copenhagen spirit"
241. as studied in John Heilbron, "The Earliest Missionaries of the Copenhagen Spirit," Revue d'Histoire des Sciences, 1985, 30:195-230.
242. Lists of the titles published in the "Frontiers of Physics" series were included in the front of each of the books within the series. The S-matrix books in the series published between 1961 and 1964 included Chew, S-Matrix Theory of Strong Interactions (1961);
243. Omnès and Froissart, Mandelstam Theory and Regge Poles (1963);
244. Frautschi, Regge Poles and S-Matrix Theory (1963);
245. E. J. Squires, Complex Angular Momenta and Particle Physics (1963);
246. and Jacob and Chew, Strong-Interaction Physics (1964). During this same period, only two books that focused on quantum field theory for particle physics were included in the series.
247. See the "Editor's Foreword" by David Pines, dated Aug. 1961, which appears within each of the volumes in the series. Frautschi's book, for example, was reproduced from hand-typed originals. Chew mentioned his friendship with Pines, also a physicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana, as one of the reasons he decided to publish his S-matrix lecture notes in this series: Chew to Kaiser, 11 May 1998 (email).
248. This reading of the material production of Chew's textbooks is inspired by the example of David Cressy, "Books as Totems in Seventeenth-Century England and New England," Journal of Library History, 1986, 21:92-106.
249. Al Mueller, "Renormalons and Phenomenology in QCD," in Passion for Physics, ed. DeTar et al, pp. 137-142, on p. 137.
250. Chew used the language of "fundamentalists" throughout his articles "Hadron Bootstrap: Triumph or Frustration?" (cit. n. 18) and "Impasse for the Elementary-Particle Concept" (cit. n. 18). See also Chew, "'Bootstrap': A Scientific Idea?" (cit. n. 18).
251. Chew, "Hadron Bootstrap," p. 24; and Chew, "Impasse for the Elementary-Particle Concept," p. 124. On the resurgence of quantum field theory see Cushing, Theory Construction, Chs. 6-7;
252. Gordon, "Strong Interactions," Chs. 4-5;
253. Andrew Pickering, Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1984), Chs. 4-8;
254. Abraham. Pais, Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), Ch. 21;
255. Tian Yu Cao, Conceptual Developments of Twentieth-Century Field Theories (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), Chs. 8-11;
256. and Lillian Hoddeson, Laurie Brown, Michael Riordan, and Max Dresden, eds., The Rise of the Standard Model: Particle Physics in the 1960s and 1970s (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997).
257. Chew, "Impasse for the Elementary-Particle Concept," p. 124; and Chew, "Hadron Bootstrap," p. 25.
258. James S. Ball, "The Application of the Mandelstam Representation to Photoproduction of Pions from Nucleons" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. California, Berkeley, 1960);
259. Bipin Desai, "Low-Energy Pion-Photon Interaction: The (2π, 2γ) Vertex" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. California, Berkeley, 1961);
260. Yongduk Kim, "Production of Pion Pairs by a Photon in the Coulomb Field of a Nucleus" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. California, Berkeley, 1961);
261. and Shu-yuan Chu, "A Study of Multi-Channel Dynamics in the New Strip Approximation" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. California, Berkeley, 1966).
262. Ball's, Desai's, and Kim's dissertations drew heavily on the work by William. Frazer and José Fulco, in particular "Effect of a Pion-Pion Scattering Resonance on Nucleon Structure" (cit. n. 15) and "Partial-Wave Dispersion Relations for the Process π + π → N + N" (cit. n. 15).
263. Chew, "Impasse for the Elementary-Particle Concept" (cit. n. 18), p. 124 (emphasis added); and Chew, "Hadron Bootstrap" (cit. n. 18), p. 27.
264. Several physicists drew these connections during their interviews with Stephen Gordon: Gordon, "Strong Interactions," pp. 50, 53-54. The statistics come from Kaiser, "Putting the 'Big' in 'Big Science'" (cit. n. 28), pp. 33-35.
265. Chew, "Impasse for the Elementary-Particle Concept" (cit. n. 18), p. 125.
266. Peter Cziffra, "The Two-Pion Exchange Contribution to the Higher Partial Waves of Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. California, Berkeley, 1960), p. 4;
267. Akbar Ahmadzadeh, "A Numerical Study of the Regge Parameters in Potential Scattering" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. California, Berkeley, 1963), pp. 2-3;
268. and Stapp interview. See Henry Stapp, "Derivation of the CPT Theorem and the Connection between Spin and Statistics from Postulates of the S-Matrix Theory," Phys. Rev., 1962, 125:2139-2162;
269. Stapp, "Axiomatic S-Matrix Theory," Rev. Mod. Phys., 1962, 34:390-394;
270. Stapp, "Analytic S-Matrix Theory," in High-Energy Physics and Elementary Particles, ed. Abdus Salam (Vienna: International Atomic Energy Agency, 1965), pp. 3-54;
271. and Stapp, "Space and Time in S-Matrix Theory," Phys. Rev., 1965, 139:B257-270.
272. Stanley Mandelstam, a close collaborator of Chew's and an architect of many of the S-matrix techniques, resisted following Chew and his group in renouncing field theory. As early as the Dec. 1960 Berkeley conference, a conference report noted that Chew's presentation based on Mandelstam's work "did not evoke Mandelstam's full assent": "Conference on Strong Interactions," p. 10, Dept. Physics, Berkeley, Records, ca. 1920-1962, Folder 1:39. See also Cushing, Theory Construction, pp. 131-132, 145.
273. Annual Report 1956-1957, pp. 1-2, in Department of Physics, Princeton University, Annual Reports to the [University] President, Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton Univ., Princeton, N.J. (hereafter cited as Dept. Physics, Princeton, Annual Reports);
274. Marvin Goldberger, "Fifteen Years in the Life of Dispersion Relations," in Subnuclear Phenomena, ed. A. Zichichi (New York: Academic, 1970), pp. 685-693;
275. Goldberger, "Francis E. Low - A Sixtieth Birthday Tribute," in Asymptotic Realms of Physics, ed. Alan Guth, Kerson Huang, and Robert Jaffe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), pp. xi-xv;
276. and Goldberger, "A Passion for Physics," in Passion for Physics, ed. DeTar et al., pp. 241-245.
277. Andrew Pickering has examined the active collaboration of Chew, Low, Goldberger, and Gell-Mann, emphasizing the importance of their geographical proximity: Andrew Pickering, "From Field to Phenomenology: The History of Dispersion Relations," in Pions to Quarks, ed. Brown et al. (cit. n. 13), pp. 579-599.
278. M. L. Goldberger and S. B. Treiman, "Decay of the Pi Meson," Phys. Rev., 1958, 110:1178-1184;
279. on the fit between the Princeton work and Chew's see Goldberger, "An Outline of Some Accomplishments in Theoretical Physics," Annual Report 1960-1961, pp. 12-13, Dept. Physics, Princeton, Annual Reports. On other work in the department see Annual Report 1958-1959, pp. 2, 7;
280. Annual Report 1960-1961, pp. 12-13;
281. Annual Report 1962-1963, p. 4;
282. Annual Report 1963-1964, p. 66;
283. Annual Report 1964-1965, pp. 79-81;
284. Annual Report 1965-1966, pp. 4-5;
285. and Annual Report 1967-1968, pp. 23-24: Dept. Physics, Princeton, Annual Reports.
286. See also Treiman, "A Connection between the Strong and Weak Interactions," in Pions to Quarks, ed. Brown et al, pp. 384-389;
287. and Treiman, "A Life in Particle Physics," Ann. Rev. Nuclear Particle Sci., 1996, 46:1-30.
288. Arthur Wightman, "The General Theory of Quantized Fields in the 1950s," in Pions to Quarks, ed. Brown et al, pp. 608-629;
289. and Annual Report 1965-1966, pp. 4-5, Dept. Physics, Princeton, Annual Reports (quotation).
290. Geoffrey Chew, interview with Gordon, Dec. 1997, quoted in Gordon, "Strong Interactions," p. 33 (see also pp. 32-35). Low credited Chew with the main originality in their collaboration in his interview with me; see also Kaiser, "Francis E. Low" (cit. n. 45), pp. 71-72.
291. Stephen Adler, telephone interview with the author, 16 Feb. 1999. This emphasis on semiphenomenological tools rather than overarching theory construction became a hallmark of Treiman's group and helped shape Adler's later work on current algebras. See Stephen Adler and Roger Dashen, Current Algebras and Applications to Particle Physics (New York: Benjamin, 1968);
292. and Sam Treiman, Roman Jackiw, and David Gross, Lectures on Current Algebra and Its Applications (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972).
293. See also Pickering, Constructing Quarks (cit. n. 65), pp. 108-114; and Cao, Conceptual Developments of Twentieth-Century Field Theories (cit. n. 65), pp. 229-246. The views of other former Princeton students are expressed in John Bronzan to Kaiser, 15 May 1997 (email), and E. E. Bergmann to Kaiser, 16 May 1997 (email). The same attitude is drawn out in the course notes taken by Kip Thorne when he was a graduate student at Princeton in the early 1960s.
294. See, in particular, Thorne's notes from "Properties of Elementary Particles," a course given by Val Fitch (Spring 1963);
295. "Elementary Particle Physics," taught by Sam Treiman (Spring 1963);
296. "Intermediate Quantum Mechanics and Applications," taught by Goldberger (Fall 1963);
297. and "Elementary Particle Theory," taught by Blankenbecler (Spring 1964). All notes in the possession of Professor Kip Thorne; my thanks to him for sharing copies of these notes.
298. Adler interview; Marvin Goldberger to Murray Gell-Mann, 27 Jan. 1962, quoted in Johnson, Strange Beauty (cit. n. 6), p. 211; and Polkinghorne, "Salesman of Ideas" (cit. n. 55), pp. 24-25. Francis Low similarly remarked that Chew's later efforts seemed "religious" in character: Low interview.
299. Adler interview; Sam Treiman, "Analyticity in Particle Physics," in Proceedings of the Eastern Theoretical Physics Conference, October 26-27, 1962, ed. M. E. Rose (New York: Gordon & Breach, 1963), pp. 127-174, on p. 149;
300. Jackson, "Introduction to Dispersion Relation Techniques" (cit. n. 14), p. 50;
301. and Treiman, "Life in Particle Physics" (cit. n. 73), p. 16. As Treiman himself later remarked of this calculation, "No one but Goldberger and I would have had the effrontery to do what Goldberger and I did": Treiman, "Connection between the Strong and Weak Interactions" (cit. n. 73), p. 388.
302. Treiman, "Analyticity in Particle Physics," pp. 163, 143. Blankenbecler and Goldberger similarly characterized Chew's bootstrap work as a collection of "interesting speculations" lacking a "physical basis." Making explicit reference to Chew's 1961 La Jolla talk, they dismissed the entire discussion as having merely a "religious nature."
303. R. Blankenbecler and M. L. Goldberger, "Behavior of Scattering Amplitudes at High Energies, Bound States, and Resonances," Phys. Rev., 1962, 126:766-786, on p. 784.
304. This article was based on Blankenbecler and Goldberger's own talk at the 1961 La Jolla meeting, as indicated in a footnote on p. 766.
305. L. F. Cook, in Annual Report 1964-1965, pp. 79-80, Dept. Physics, Princeton, Annual Reports (emphasis added). Interestingly, Cook conducted this research with C. Edward Jones, a new Princeton postdoc who had just completed his dissertation under Chew's direction in Berkeley. Each of the courses on particle theory that Kip Thorne attended as a graduate student at Princeton during this period was labeled "elementary particle physics" or "elementary particle theory," further reinforcing this nonbootstrap view of the field. A second center on which it would be interesting to focus, to extend the analysis of the heterogeneity among S-matrix groups, would be Cambridge, England, which hosted a group centered on R. J. Eden, P. J. Landshoff, D. Olive, and J. Polkinghorne; see their textbook, The Analytic S-Matrix (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966), and references therein. Paul Matthews delivered his inaugural lecture at Imperial College in Nov. 1962 with the title "Some Particles Are More Elementary than Others" (London: Imperial College, Nov. 1962).
306. On this point see esp. Oreskes and Rainger, "Science and Security before the Atomic Bomb" (cit. n. 24).
307. Marcello Cini, who worked as a dispersion-relations theorist during the 1950s, has offered a somewhat strained argument that dispersion relations, which promised "utilitarian" correlations among the newly acquired reams of experimental data, took hold because of its fit with "the dominant ideology in the U.S." Marcello Cini, "The History and Ideology of Dispersion Relations: The Pattern of Internal and External Factors in a Paradigmatic Shift," Fundamenta Scientiae, 1980, 7:157-172, on p. 157.
308. On the question of iconoclasm, Chew's case warrants comparison with that of David Bohm. Just as Bohm was losing his Princeton job for not cooperating with HUAC, he published two long articles questioning the dominance of the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics and offering a new one in its place. Much as Chew would do in 1961, Bohm thus challenged the accepted physics orthodoxy in a manner consistent with his postwar political convictions. Unlike Chew, however, Bohm (at least later, starting ca. 1960) proclaimed that his ideas in physics were actually inspired by his political thinking.
309. See David Bohm, "A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of 'Hidden' Variables: I and II," Phys. Rev., 1952, 85:166-179, 180-193;
310. Olwell, "Physical Isolation and Marginalization in Physics" (cit. n. 9); James Cushing, Quantum Mechanics: Historical Contingency and the Copenhagen Hegemony (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1994);
311. F. David Peat, Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm (Reading, Pa.: Addison-Wesley, 1997), Chs. 5, 6, 8;
312. Mullet, "Political Science" (cit. n. 9);
313. and Kojevnikov, "David Bohm and Collective Movement" (cit. n. 9).
314. Wolfgang Pauli, for one, saw fit to merge Bohm's work in physics with his political troubles, describing Bohm's "younger fellow-travellers (mostly 'deterministic' fanaticists, more or less marxistically coloured)." Pauli believed that Bohm had blurred the line between political engagement and physical theorizing.
315. See Pauli to Léon Rosenfeld, 16 Mar. 1952, in Pauli, Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, ed. von Meyenn (cit. n. 39), Vol. 4, Pt. 1, pp. 582-583.
316. Cf. Pauli to Abraham Pais, 7 Mar. 1952, in which he labels Bohm a "Sektenpfaff," or, roughly, "cult leader" (ibid., pp. 626-627).
317. Regarding possible ties between Berkeley's political culture and his physics program, Chew responded recently that he "had never thought about it," though such connections are "a possibility worth considering": Chew, interview with Gordon, Dec. 1997, quoted in Gordon, "Strong Interactions," p. 37. Links between his specific pedagogical efforts and his theoretical approach to particle physics strike a similar chord these days from Chew, who recalls only that "I might have had some idea of that," though "it's hard to recapture the way one was thinking in an earlier period" - which, after all, occurred four decades ago: Geoffrey Chew interview with the author, Berkeley, 10 Feb. 1998. More recently, Chew wrote that an earlier draft of this essay, which made the case for substantive intellectual links between his politics, pedagogy, and physics, was "perceptive and accurate": Chew to Kaiser, 19 Aug. 1999.